The amazing Glen Curtiss

Celebrating an aeronautical pioneer who had many talents and interests.

 GLEN Curtiss was a visionary.

He transformed a bicycle repair shop into a motorcycle manufacturing company. He developed and tested a flying car in 1917. And he also made contributions to the development of recreational vehicles, to automotive design, and even to the transformation of Florida.

In partnership with Carl G. Fisher of Fisher Auto Body, they made Miami a destination for the rich and famous, and made several million dollars in the process. But this was after he had officially announced his retirement.

Curtiss also played a key role in the creation of the modern automobile dealership. The contributions were a process developed through the selling of Ford, Frayer-Miller, and Orient Buckboard vehicles in his hometown of Hammondsport, New York.

There was little in his childhood to indicate that he would be successful, famous, or that he would make such a diverse array of contributions.

Frank R. Curtiss, his father, was a harness maker that died when Glen was only four years of age. It was only the first of many crises that marred his childhood. Lua, his mother, took in boarders, did laundry, sewing and other jobs to provide for her family.

Then in 1887, Rutha, his youngest sister, came down with meningitis. Lua moved to Rochester, New York, so Rutha could attend the Western New York Institute for Deaf-Mutes, now known as the Rochester School for the Deaf. Glenn was left in Hammondsport with distant family members to finish his education but proved to be “unruly.” And so, he joined his family in Rochester after completion of the 8th grade.

The following year Glenn Curtiss found employment with the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co., the predecessor of Eastman Kodak, to apply stencils to film stock. He was ambitious and quick to learn, and soon was moved to another department where he worked assembling cameras.

Aside from using his money to help support the family, he saved money for a new bicycle. On acquisition he left Kodak and became a bicycle messenger with the Rochester office of Western Union. Bicycles would become the cornerstone for Curtiss’s far-ranging interests in transportation and engineering.

His mother married J. Charles Adams who owned an orchard and vineyard in Rock Springs, New York and the family relocated. This was just eighteen miles east of Hammondsport, headquarters for a highly active chapter of the League of American Wheelman. With a passion for bicycling Curtiss soon became a very active member that participated in racing and long-distance touring.

 And he found employment as a delivery agent for the local pharmacist, James H. Smellie. Fortuitously Smellie was also a passionate bicyclist and owned Hammondsport’s sole bicycle retail and repair facility. This provided Curtiss with a second job. In 1900, Curtiss was an offered an opportunity to purchase the bicycle repair business.

He quickly displayed a natural talent for business. Within a year he was the region’s largest distributor of Cleveland, Columbia, National, Racycle and Stearns bicycles. He was also designing and manufacturing custom bicycles for customers using parts sourced from his suppliers under the ‘Hercules’ trade name.

By early 1902 he had established Curtiss’ Bicycle Stores and opened stores in Bath and Corning, New York.  A months prior Curtiss had attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York and watched a demonstration of the E.R. Thomas Auto-Bi, a motorcycle. This led him to diversify his business.

Using mail-order E.R. Thomas raw block castings and a carburetor of his design, he began offering pedal and powered motorcycles. This proved to be a short-lived endeavor as Curtiss was dissatisfied with the durability of the engines.

So, he designed an engine, manufactured a prototype, and sought investors. By the end of the year, he had founded the G.H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company and began to manufacture his own line of motorcycles and motorcycle engines under the Hercules brand name.

In January 1903, Curtiss attended the New York Automobile Show, displayed the Curtiss motorcycles and engine, and took orders. Undaunted by anemic sales, that spring Curtiss turned to racing as a means to promote his Hercules motorcycle. In the first race entered he piloted a Hercules V-twin equipped motorcycle to victory in a ten-mile race and set a one-mile speed record in the process.

The well-publicised victory translated into sales. It also led to legal issues as a small California company was producing bicycles and motorized bicycles using the Hercules name that they had trademarked as a brand. Curtiss was forced to reorganize his company and began producing motorcycles and their engines using his name. But this negated the promotional benefits of his initial racing successes.

The setback was only temporary. At Ormond Beach, Florida, now Daytona Beach, Curtiss made successive attempts at breaking the World Land Speed record. It was the publicity he needed.

Soon his company was flooded with orders for his motorcycle and the engines that he offered as standalone powerplant to third parties. Within two years the Curtiss V-Twin was the most popular motorcycle engine in the country.

Even though motorcycle development and manufacturing, and a quest for ever greater speed were his primary focus, increasingly Curtiss’ attentions were captured by manned flight.  After his failure to attract the interest of the pioneering Wright Brothers, Curtiss began assembling some experimental aircraft in Hammondsport, New York.

He constructed his own aircraft, the ’Gold Bug’, the first aircraft to use ailerons, which was sold to the New York Aero Club for $5,000. The sale infuriated the Wright Brothers, who believed that they held the patent on all moveable wing surfaces. The Wrights filed a lawsuit against Curtiss in August of 1909. It was one of the most vicious and costly vehicle-based lawsuits in United States history.

Undaunted Curtiss continued developing and improving his engines, and on May 29th, 1910, piloted the V-8 equipped ‘Hudson Flyer’ on a 151-mile flight from Albany to Governor’s Island in 2 hours, 51 minutes, at an average of 52 m.p.h. This earned him a $10,000 prize from Scientific American.

While most aeronautical pioneers were focused on simply getting a plane off the ground, Curtiss was working on development of an airplane that could take off from water. And then he had a eureka moment and shifted focus. In November 1910, his idea was made manifest when Eugene Ely launched an airplane from a specially designed platform on the U.S. S. Birmingham and flew his Curtiss to shore at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Even more importantly in July 1911, Ely made flew from San Bruno, California’s Tanforan racetrack and landed his Curtiss on a specially built platform on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbor. The two events marked the first time an aircraft had made a ship-borne take-off and a ship-borne landing and was the cornerstone for development of the aircraft carrier.

By the early teens Curtis had developed, and was manufacturing bi-planes, the Curtis JN-1 and JN- 2. In 1916 the US Army Air Corps and the Royal Flying Corps, after extensive testing placed a series of large orders for the JN-4 trainers, known as the Curtiss ‘Jenny’. It is estimated the ninety-five percent of all American pilots in WWI were trained on a Jenny.

Curtiss expanded the Garden City, Long Island research facility and began producing a small number of OX-5 engines, JN-4 trainers, and Curtiss hydroplanes for the military. With the ramp up to war Curtiss was contracted to produce 3,000 Spad single seat fighters as well as Bristol F.2 fighters in late 1917.

Meanwhile Curtiss initiated a series of projects with Buffalo, New York based Brunn & Company, a leading manufacturer of custom automobile bodies. Between 1916 and 1918 Brunn constructed four custom bodies designed by Curtiss and mounted them on Marmon 34, Pierce-Arrow 66, and Cadillac Type 53 chassis.

Herman C. Brunn, the son of the firm’s founder, Hermann A. Brunn, in an interview published Antique Automobile, he noted that, “…Mr. Curtiss became one of the firm’s most valued and loyal customers. His choice of chassis ranged from the Pierce Arrow 66, Marmon 34 and Cadillac. He haunted the factory whenever one of his bodies was being built and was on a first name basis with many of the employees. He even contributed some early aerodynamic design features to two bodies built on the Pierce-Arrow 66 chassis.

As well as being a considerate and astute man, he was a workman himself and a stimulating person to have around. The last of the cars was a 1916 town car built for Mrs. Curtiss on a 145” wheelbase Cadillac chassis. Mr. Curtiss wrote my father (Hermann A. Brunn) a letter in 1923, the last paragraph of which reads as follows: ‘It may interest you to know that the suburban town car built on the 145” wheelbase Cadillac is still doing service in almost daily runs to town, and although it is now seven years old, it is as good looking as any car that tolls the streets of New York.’

The cars designed from the perspective of aeronautical streamlining were unlike anything on the road. The windshields were deeply angled in “V.”  The roofs were rounded and sloped at the rear.  The vehicle designed for the Pierce Arrow chassis had no running boards. Instead, a step folded down automatically when the door opened. Suspension included innovative Westinghouse air-springs; a component developed in part by Curtiss.

Then Curtiss turned his attention to development of a vehicle that blended the airplane with the automobile. The result was the wildly futuristic Curtiss Model 11 Autoplane. Curtiss introduced the unique vehicle at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition during the week of February 8, 1917.

The vehicle was designed and tested to an airspeed of 65 m.p.h. and a road speed of 45 m.p.h. It featured a heated cabin with plush leather seats, One for the pilot and two for passengers behind.  The fully enclosed aluminum body was equipped with celluloid windows. On the road propulsion was derived from a four-blade propeller at the rear of the roof which was connected to the front-mounted 100bhp Curtiss OXX V8 engine via a complex driveshaft, belt, and pulley arrangement.

Two permanently mounted canard wings were affixed to the extreme front of the body. The removable Curtiss Model L tri-plane wings gave the 27-foot-long vehicle a 40-foot 6-inch wingspan. Both the wings and tail detached as a single unit. The shortage of materials resultant of WWI brought the project to a halt after only a few test flights.

Written by Jim Hinckley of jimhinckleysamerica.com